BIOGRAPHY
It’s embarrassing, of course, to talk
or write about oneself, to show off, to presume
that other people might be interested in one’s
own sad and wasted life, when clearly other
people have sad and wasted lives of their
own to be getting on with.

As a child it was always impressed upon
me, as a matter of the utmost importance
- more important almost than any other virtue,
in fact, the first of the commandments -
not to be a ‘big head’. There
was no greater a slur, no more forceful
a dismissal when I was growing up in the
Sansom household, around our tiny blue formica-topped
kitchen table, or later - when we had the
extension put on – around the smoky-brown
laminate breakfast bar, than for my mum
or my dad to describe someone, politicians
usually, but often also teachers, and doctors,
or indeed anyone in authority, who presumed
to speak out on behalf of themselves or
others, as a big head. Indeed, my dad even
taught us an old music hall song, which
began ‘Why does everybody call me
“Big Head”?’, which we
used to chorus whenever we felt someone
was boasting unnecessarily of their achievements:
Mrs Thatcher; Arthur Scargill; Jim Callaghan;
Robert Robinson; Benazir Bhuto; and anyone
who’d passed the eleven-plus.

So writing
about myself does make me feel uneasy and
uncomfortable, like I’m running a slight
temperature and am about to do something I
know I really shouldn’t be doing or
don’t know how to do: kissing a woman
who is not my wife, say, or operating some
kind of heavy machinery, or examining the
following diagram and calculating its perimeter;
it makes me apprehensive. It makes me want
to check over my shoulder for God, or the
invigilator, or at least my parents, or my
sister, or my own younger self, either seething
and sniggering at my arrogance and pretension,
or just ashamed at this big galoot up front
who’s assuming that anybody cares about
what he has to say; I mean, really. To take
up other people’s time, talking and
writing about oneself as if in some way it
mattered, as if it had to be told, as if it
had to happen, the fulfilment of manifest
destiny, as natural and as inevitable as for
some other people it is natural and inevitable
to have to get up every morning and go to
work at the post office, or fitting tyres
and clutches, or cleaning out septic tanks?
It’s ridiculous. It’s just too
much. Whenever I read or hear anybody –
with the possible exception of, say, Nelson
Mandela - writing or talking about themselves
I find my inner Essex teenager rising up within
me, my censor and my guide, banging on the
blue formica and shouting out, Why does everybody
call me ‘Big Head?’?

It’s a shame. Because if you were
raised from an early age in the tradition
of what one might call radical English modesty,
as I was, and yet nonetheless you have dreams
and desires and ambitions – and, frankly,
who doesn’t, even people from Essex
– and let’s just say, for the
sake of argument, that you work hard and
stay up late at night and get up early in
the morning and do whatever is necessary
to make your way in the world and that you
find one day, by sheer luck and dogged determination,
that you’ve done it, that you have
achieved at least some of your dreams and
desires and ambitions, then what you’re
going to feel is embarrassment.

Not that embarrassment is all bad; indeed,
to be forever unembarrassed must be worse;
to be forever unembarrassed would be to
become a monster of egotism, or someone
on the telly. Embarrassment is not a necessary
qualification for becoming a writer - not
like, say, raging narcissism, which is pretty
much an essential - but I have come to believe
that it’s probably a big help. I find
that I’m often easily embarrassed,
even in my own company, and particularly
when I’m writing. It often seems when
one is writing, in fact, that all one is
doing is learning that one can’t write
– just as when one is learning to
love what you’re really learning is
that you can’t love, you can’t
do it, but you swallow your pride and keep
on trying to do it regardless. This may
make writing sound like some kind of disorder
or tendency, but I would regard it more
as an excuse – a kind of mitigation
or an apology for not doing something else;
for writing something else; something better.
When you’re writing you’re not
really learning about characterisation,
or plotting, or morality – pah! -
you are learning, literally and simply,
how to write, how to get a particular phrase
or sentence or paragraph to move and make
sense. And when one is writing about oneself
what one is doing is recording something
that both does and doesn’t quite exist;
what you’re writing, in fact, is an
excuse for the past.

Writing about oneself is also, it seems to me,
an act of self-sufficiency, like wanting to have
your own acre of land, and a tethered cow and
some chickens and beehives, and to mash your own
beer, and to bottle your own jam and preserve
your own tomatoes. It’s a kind of recycling.
It’s like home cooking. I gave a reading
at a public library recently and a lady in the
audience got up and quoted to me something I’d
written about reading and writing being a form
of ‘mental knitting’. Didn’t
that denigrate reading and writing, she asked?
Didn’t it make it sound worthless and pathetic?
Didn’t it in fact demonstrate precisely
my own obvious superfluity, and my limited grasp
of the potential of great literature to transform
us and to make us anew? Yes, absolutely, I agreed,
because I was too embarrassed to disagree. She
had a point: ‘mental knitting’ is
maybe not quite right. I think it would be better
to compare writing as an activity to making flapjacks.
It takes longer, of course, but the ingredients
are similar – sugar, syrup, oats and butter
- and one hopes it gives people a little something
to chew over. I think I could stand by flapjacks,
even in a heated debate; no need to apologise
for them, because I believe in the making of flapjacks
in exactly the same way I believe in writing,
as a small gesture of hope in the face of the
unbeatable and overpowering logic of despair.
The trouble is, you can never make enough flapjacks;
they’re always gone before you know it;
the air-tight container has emptied. By writing,
one hopes, there’s more than enough to go
around.

Ian Sansom is from Essex.

The only good
advice my first agent gave me: don’t staple manuscripts.
Then he dropped me like a hot potato.